M5 and Panther Lake are both late 2025 releases. They're fair comparisons.
But it’s like a margin call. Everything is great until it completely sucks. Of course a lot of that comes down to TSMC. So if Apple falls it’s likely others will too.
Volume takes time. That's why we're seeing 2026. And before someone says "that just gives Apple an advantage because they're smaller," Apple is shipping a comparable volume of CPUs - and they're doing basically all their volume on the latest fabrication tech.
There are no benchmarked samples yet.
I'd love Intel to do well with this, but Intel has disappointed before.